Author: davidw

Having been born and raised in Oregon, California has been a touchy subject for as long as I can remember; I’ve heard all the jokes. However, as YIMBYs, we welcome people from everywhere, no matter where they “decided” to be born.

There is no doubt that California’s housing crisis affects us here in Oregon, though. The average house price in San Francisco is over 1.3 million dollars – and there are other areas in the Bay Area that cost even more. Sure, there’s high demand to live there, but there has also been an abject failure to provide enough housing for all the jobs in the area, something that has ratcheted prices up, and up, and up, to the point where on a cost of living basis, poverty in California is the highest in the nation. Here’s a chart of housing production over the years in California. Even during the boom years it never hit highs from previous decades, despite more and more people wanting to live there to have access to jobs and other positive aspects of life in that state.

No wonder some people there can afford to sell out and move here because it’s “cheap”; and others, who have no hope of buying a home where they’re from, move to Oregon!

Oregon’s pretty nice, and I think people would move here anyway even if housing costs weren’t a factor. That’s great! I like living in a place where other people choose to live too. It sure beats living someplace that’s slowly fading away because there are no reasons to live there anymore.

But it’d also be nice if everyone who wanted to could find a place – maybe not the largest, fanciest place, but someplace – to live in California if that’s where they want to live – for a job, to stay close to family, or just because it’s right for them.

At Bend YIMBY, we decided we’re not quite to the point where we can endorse candidates during the current election here in Bend… but it seems like a lot of people here know someone in California, and we’d sure like to encourage them to vote for the YIMBY’s there! Go check out these

As we fight to keep Bend a healthy, affordable city with housing options, we realize that it’s a fight that is going on in many cities and towns across the country, and we support those doing their part to fix larger cities throughout the broader west coast that influence our own housing market.

Vacancy rates are really low: even if you have the money to rent a place, it can be difficult finding something that’s open.

And for a lot of people, it can be tough to find a place they can afford, either to rent, or as a first home to purchase. Even if you have a home already, there are good reasons to be concerned about this: could your kids afford to live here if they wanted? How about people like nurses, firefighters, police and teachers, to say nothing of all those who work in jobs that pay even less.

According to a local survey of the homelessness, economic factors are one of the top reasons people become homeless: the rent is too high for many.

Bend YIMBY is one of many YIMBY – “Yes In My Back Yard” – groups springing up around the country, in places that have housing problems. We are pro-housing, in order to keep prices under control.

What we need is more housing supply. But that doesn’t just mean lots of tract housing on the east side, with cul-de-sacs and arterial roads that no one wants to walk along. It means more options throughout town. Apartments, townhouses, duplexes, triplexes, and yes, of course, single family homes too.

We used to build a wider variety of options than we do now. For instance, the O’Kane building (1918) originally had ground floor retail, some office space, and living quarters upstairs.

Not far away are the Broadway apartments, also around 100 years old:

What we do:

Advocate for specific developments that add to housing options within town – apartments, mixed use, and other things that add more variety.

Advocate for policies that have the potential to add housing, and to the variety of housing options available.

Advocate for a broad mix of development styles, sizes and costs, and which include safe and convenient ways to get around to work, school or play.

Housing in Bend is way more expensive than our median take home pay, which is one reason why the housing crisis is felt so acutely here. Prices are starting to get high enough that businesses are having trouble attracting people. Perhaps some of those businesses can afford to pay more, but not everything operates at high margins.

The StartupBend.com web site does a great job covering local entrepreneurs, startups and tech in town, all things that can contribute to higher paying, rewarding jobs in Bend, which, as economist Enrico Morretti points out in his book The New Geography of Jobs can have a lot of positive effects for the economy beyond the people hired and companies hiring them. With the caveat that we need to do more to ensure that high paying jobs don’t simply drive up housing prices as has happened in places like Boulder, Colorado or the California Bay Area.

Curious about what goes into planning and land use decisions in Bend? We’ve invited Colin Stephens from the City of Bend to come talk about the local process, rules and regulations. There’ll be plenty of time to ask questions, and chat with your fellow YIMBYs.

Join us on Monday, May 21st, at 5:30PM, at McMenamins – we’ll be in the “smoking room” (where there will be no actual smoking!).

Something that comes up a lot in discussions about housing in Bend is traffic and congestion, especially talking about the east side of town.

If you look at how cities used to be built, with a fine grained grid, it turns out that that’s probably the best strategy.

Grids have been used in cities for thousands of years: the Romans used them and they probably weren’t the first.

The older areas of Bend have a nice grid, where if one intersection is blocked off, you can easily detour around it. It’s never that far between two points on the grid, and travel is mostly predictable.

Compare and contrast with the east side, which has more cul-de-sac and arterial development, where a few big roads get all the traffic, and many roads don’t go anywhere. This might be nice for the people who get no traffic, but it has a high cost in terms of resilience and adaptability, two qualities in high demand for a rapidly growing city.

Here are two adjacent properties – neighboring houses – where the drive to get from one to the other is 1.5 miles!

No wonder traffic can be problematic in that area and will get worse as it grows – you have to drive on a major road just to get to a neighboring house!

Unfortunately, I do not know if there are any good solutions to this conundrum – you can’t go back and impose a grid on areas like that at this point, because it’s all built out and people live in those houses.

The best we can do is go back to a sensible, flexible, adaptable design that has served humanity well for thousands of years for our future development.